Alice, Afterwards
by Chanelberry
Summary: Sometimes, Alice tries to find her way back into Wonderland, and maybe a part of her has always stayed there.


AN: This story is a curious blend of the Tim Burton film, the original children's book, my twisted imagination, and the real life of Alice Hargreaves, nee Liddell, who served as Lewis Carroll's muse and inspiration. History buffs, please don't hate me for moving the London bombings to the first world war!

_Sometimes, Alice tries to find her way back into Wonderland, and maybe a part of her has always stayed there._

**Alice, Afterwards**

"Fairfarren," the Hatter had murmured, tea-stained breath warm against her ear, but the skies above the ocean-road to China roll with thunder and lightning and storm clouds. Alice grips the railing for support as the ship seesaws along the tumbling, towering mass of waves. She wonders if this is her end, this dark and watery death, if her body will rise to the surface, bloated and gray, like the silent faces she once crossed to reach the Red Queen's castle.

But, fortunately, the crew is competent. The rain drizzles to a stop and the wind calms as they drift further east. Succumbing to seasickness, Alice retches over the starboard side, emptying the contents of her stomach into the churning ocean. If nothing else, the storm has brought her closer to the prospect of her own mortality.

"How will I die?" she asks the rippling waves, tongue coated with the bittersweet aftertaste of vomit and the salt of sea-spray. What is a fitting death for the girl who slew the Jabberwocky?

* * *

"Tell me something," Alice says to the Hatter on Frabjous Eve. "Whatever happened to the walrus?"

The Hatter smiles, quick and quizzical under the moonlight that veils Mirana's balcony in silver. "What walrus?"

"There was always a walrus, in my dreams, before," Alice persists. "You know, the one who walked with oysters?"

The Hatter starts to laugh--- little snorts and hiccups that make his shoulders shake, causing him to double over. "We don't _walk _with oysters. We _eat _them." He glances at her perplexed expression, then breaks anew into another rash of giggles. "My dear Alice, I do believe you've gone quite mad."

* * *

She meets a boy named Reginald Hargreaves in an antique bookstore in Taipei. Their hands touch when they reach for the same leather-bound volume on the shelves.

"Forgive me," he says in the crisp, feathered accents of her homeland. "I need this text, but perhaps I can make it up to you by taking you out for lunch?"

In the shop's shadowed half-light, amidst the scent of dust and vellum, his eyes aren't quite as piercing green as the Hatter's, but green, nonetheless. Alice accepts.

* * *

The March Hare flings a bowl of pudding at the wall. Alice flinches upon hearing the sound of breaking porcelain, while the White Queen remains unruffled, gracing the surroundings with a gentle smile.

"What's wrong with the Hare?" Alice asked.

"Wrong?" The White Queen is daintily puzzled.

"Something must have happened to make him... like that." The bowl is quickly followed by a mug of apple cider. The liquid fizzles as it drips onto the marble tiles.

"Oh, he's always been like that, as long as I can recall." Mirana dismisses the matter with a casually elegant flutter of her hand. "He does get a bit high-strung at times. I think it's the stress of too many unbirthdays."

Alice's brow wrinkles. "Unbirthdays?"

"The days of the year when it's not your birthday." Mirana leans forward, her voice lowering to a throaty, confidential stage-whisper. "The March Hare, however, does _not _have a birthday."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. You never gave him one."

Alice stares at Mirana, and it occurs to her that the White Queen's smile is wide and beautiful and just the slightest bit off, like broken glass glinting in the sunlight, like a dappled lake with shadows lurking beneath the surface, like summer air with a sharp edge, hinting at the cold and deadly bite of frost.

"Do you know," says Alice, "I think you're a tad bonkers as well."

Mirana blinks. "Oh, Alice. Of course." Her dark eyes gleam. "We're all mad here."

* * *

"Fairfarren," the Hatter had said, but World War I paints the skies in a blaze of gray fury and red fire, thickening the air with smoke and plaster-dust and the wail of air-raid sirens. Alice loses her home to the Blitzkrieg and two of her sons to the trenches, bright-eyed boys who she once tucked into bed every starlit night, who went off, strong and handsome in their crisp uniforms, to fight madmen in a foreign land. Bright-eyed boys who never came back.

Alice clutches her keening daughter to her bosom as they huddle in the darkness of the underground shelter. Above them, London is being ravaged by bombs, stripped clear of its tall, proud buildings and its human lives.

"Did I ever tell you about Tweedledum and Tweedledee?"

The child's cries fade into soft, wet sniffles as she listens to Alice weave once more the story of a world beneath the earth, where dogs could talk and cats could disappear, where wonder was always, always just a breath away.

* * *

"Oh," the Hatter blurts out as they march to the battlefield. "The walrus. I remember him now."

"And?" Alice prompts.

"He was a propagandist. He made pamphlets denouncing Iracebeth's reign and snuck them around in oyster shells. Quite a clever fellow." The Hatter chuckles. His eyes take on that peculiar golden glow and his voice deepens from syrupy lisp to rich, dark brogue. "The Red Queen had him executed. We were too late. I saw his head roll over the stones."

Alice is silent. Beside her, the Cheshire Cat grins.

"Cabbages and kings, eh, Alice?" he says. "Cabbages and kings."

* * *

When Alice's golden hair begins to show the first threads of gray, Reginald contracts a fever, which turns out to be malaria. It is an arduous process, waiting for the inevitable, and she almost exhales a breath of relief in tandem with his last.

Days after the funeral, she finds herself wandering along the Ascott property, although perhaps _wandering _is not the right word, as she stops in front of the hole in the gnarled tree roots, where she once fell beneath the earth, and maybe every step she's taken since then was always meant to lead her back here. Before, she was Alice, with a father named Charles and a sister named Margaret, Alice who overthrew the Red Queen, but now she is Alice the old, Alice the widow, Alice who lives in the spaces between the stories.

Without conscious thought or decision, she kneels down, getting wet earth all over the stark black robes of mourning. Her wrinkled fingers tremble as she attempts to claw her way into the hole; her back and joints ache as she bends and tries to wedge herself in, tries once more to fall. But she meets only resistance: solid ground and tree roots, the musky smell of damp. The servants find her, much later, still feverishly digging and pushing, skin covered in scratches. They pull her away and she screams, a hoarse and jagged sound that rips into the air, like the shrieks of the Jubjub Bird, so long ago.

Alice commands the servants to release her, her eyes blinded with tears that sting. They do not listen, and she is forcefully led back to the house. She struggles in their grasp, but she is an old woman now, and weak, and perhaps there are many ways into Underland but one cannot walk the same path twice.

"Off with your heads," she chokes, thickly, through the gasping mire of her own sobs, but she is not Iracebeth, and there is no Red Guard to carry out her orders.

* * *

"Are you afraid?" Mirana asks as they await the enemy's arrival.

"A little," Alice confesses.

"You shouldn't be."

"Whyever not? I could fail. I could die---"

The Hatter interrupts with a breezy chuckle, shaking his head. "You still don't understand, do you?"

"Understand _what?"_

It may be just a trick of the red light, but the Hatter's green eyes seem to glow golden at the edges once more. "You can never die here. Not even if you wanted to."

* * *

The physicians, an endless slew of them, men whose beady eyes are hard behind their thick glasses, declare Alice Hargreaves clinically insane as she rants and raves about a cat who is the moon and flowers that talk. Hamish, who still harbours bitterness over that humiliating long-ago proposal, persuades her remaining children to confine her in an asylum. "For her own good," he says, and so Alice enters a world of gray walls and rank smells and chilling screams in the night. Time has no meaning here--- there was a quarrel, she remembers, Time and the Hatter had a quarrel and Time went off to sulk, and now it's always six o'clock.

Whenever her daughter comes to visit, Alice finds herself wondering how anyone could be so young. Perhaps Time is mad at Celeste as well, and so he left her behind while Alice continues to shrivel with age.

One night, she wakes up to the scent of tea and velvet. The Hatter sits on the edge of her bed, peering solemnly at her in the moonlight.

"How did you get here?" she asks, heart thumping wildly against her rib cage.

"There are many ways out of Underland," he intones, shrouded in mystery.

"I'm so glad to see you," she cries, breathless and excited. "They locked me up in this place. They said I was mad, that I was making it all up, but you're _here. _You're _real, _and---" She falters to a stop, because he is shaking his head.

"Hatter?" she says uneasily, and he doesn't say anything for a long while. Over his shoulder, beyond the window grilles, Alice glimpses a city bathed in silver shadows. Has it really been so long since she rushed through a wilder and more sprawling landscape, since rocks and trees and mountains blurred into mere splashes of faded colour as she rode on the Bandersnatch's back?

"Hatter!"

"Eh?" He jerks, blinks owlishly. "Beg pardon. It's so crowded in here."

Now Alice feels the faint stirrings of doubt. "Hatter, you're real. It's all real. Isn't it?"

"In a manner of speaking." He sighs, drawn out and tired. "Alice, my dear." His voice is grave. "Don't you ask yourself why I never grow old?"

She sinks into the pillows as the world begins to spin. The screaming starts, but her mouth is closed; it's only in her head, and maybe it always was. The Hatter leans in.

"Give Time back to me," he whispers. "I'm exhausted. Give the March Hare a birthday, so he can die. Let us go, Alice. The walrus was lucky because you loved him best. What about the rest of us? Kill us, Alice. All of us. Let us go."

* * *

The Red Queen's army still hasn't arrived. The White Rabbit pulls out his stopwatch and clucks his tongue.

"That's what I hate about this place," he grumbles to Alice. "No one is ever on time."


End file.
